The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty

By Lawrence Otis Graham

“A cohesive picture of an extraordinary figure. . . . The issues raised by Bruce’s life and career resonate today, making Graham’s book not just a history but a revealing commentary on race and class, and on their inordinately powerful force in shaping our lives today.”—Chicago Tribune

Spanning more than a century, Lawrence Otis’s illuminating biography is a fascinating look at race and class in America, witnessed through the life of Blanche Kelso Bruce—the head of America’s first black dynasty and the first black U.S. senator. Otis reveals how Bruce rose from slavery to achieve power and prestige in the aftermath of the Civil War. With his wife, the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia physician, he would break social and racial barriers—a legacy continued by their children until scandal destroyed the family’s wealth and stature. Filled with triumph and tragedy, Otis’s riveting book brings into focus an important yet little-known segment of our nation’s past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061873911

Lawrence Otis Graham

The author of fourteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Our Kind of People, and a contributing editor for Reader's Digest, Lawrence Otis Graham's work has also appeared in the New York Times, Essence, and The Best American Essays.

Book preview

THE SENATOR AND THE SOCIALITE

The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty

LAWRENCE OTIS GRAHAM

To my mother,

Betty Johnyce Walker Graham,

for challenging bias

with courage and grace.

To my father,

Richard Charles Graham,

for remembering our

people’s history.

To my wife,

Pamela Thomas-Graham,

for everything else.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

HE WAS A FORMER SLAVE WHO LIVED IN MISSISSIPPI AND UNDERSTOOD how to exploit the harsh rules that governed black-white relations during the post–Civil War period. She was the daughter of a wealthy black doctor whose family socialized with and drew on their black Northern society connections in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Washington. He was a shrewd political operative who learned how to forge ties between newly freed blacks and white Republicans while also building a real estate portfolio that would fund his political career. She was the sophisticated educator who could bring polish, style, and an understanding of black and white society to the union. Together, they straddled the black and white upper-class worlds with a calculated finesse that made their work seem almost effortless.

The family forged between Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce and his wife, Josephine Willson Bruce, was an extraordinary one, which came to represent wealth, position, academic accomplishment, notoriety, and power in both black and white circles. It was a family that united two very different people from two very different circles.

I wrote this book in order to tell the story of how a slave born in 1841 rose from being a minor landowner in Mississippi to becoming the first African-American to serve a full term as a United States senator. Through his friendships with President Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and many white Republicans and Democrats, Bruce gained appointments under four presidents and was twice named to a Treasury post that placed his name on U.S. currency.

In researching the lives of Senator Bruce and his wife, Josephine, I found something more than the accomplishments of two individuals who thrived in spite of the racial discrimination that surrounded them. By following three fascinating generations of this upper-class family from 1841 to 1967, I discovered America’s first true black dynasty.

While the family moves from Virginia to Mississippi to Washington, DC, to Tuskegee to Boston and, finally, in the late 1920s, to New York, the important events in our nation’s history unfold with dramatic consequences. Along with this political history comes a social history that describes the rise and fall of America’s first black upper-class family.

This is a family that produced successive generations of Ivy League graduates: a son who graduated from a prestigious East Coast WASP establishment school, Phillips Exeter Academy, and went on to become a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard University; a daughter-in-law who entered Radcliffe College in 1901 and who, while at Boston University Law School, became the first woman of any color to serve as president of a law review. Their grandchildren were similarly educated at Exeter, Harvard, Radcliffe, and Harvard Law School—all at a time when members of the black upper class lived awkwardly and quietly between a black America that didn’t understand them and a white America that feared or despised them. It was a family that at one time owned an 1,100-acre plantation, summer homes, residences in three states, and town houses in Washington where they entertained the most powerful black and white political figures of the nineteenth century.

The family story of Blanche and Josephine Bruce shows how a black U.S. senator and his black socialite wife became a lightning rod for politics, social discourse, and racial intrigue that mystified most whites and angered many blacks. It is a story that bridges the Civil War, Reconstruction, Southern Redemption, northern migration, the 1929 economic depression, and the modern civil rights period.

In their later generations, the Bruce family enhanced their status by forging a ten-year relationship with multimillionaire philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr.; by producing a superintendent of the Washington, DC, segregated school district; and by marrying into families that brought them additional contacts. When the senator’s granddaughter eloped with the light-skinned son of an elite black Washington family, her father attempted to annul the marriage out of fear that it would jeopardize her admission to Radcliffe. Years later, the marriage would become even more complicated, when the husband passed for white in order to succeed as an actor in Hollywood and on the New York stage. This decision required the senator’s granddaughter to divorce her family and relinquish her black identity.

But the Bruce family also made enemies by taking on public battles with many people, such as nineteenth-century conservatives in the Senate; the twentieth-century black newspaper publisher who chased them out of Washington because he felt the Bruces acted too white; the president of Harvard who, in 1923, refused to allow one of the Bruce children to move into an all-white dormitory; and powerful Harlem residents who felt the Bruce family looked down on those around them. Because their loyalties to the black working classes were questioned in Washington and again in Harlem, they had an awkward relationship with many blacks in America. But they similarly offended whites, because they demanded respect for their own race and position.

Finally, they faced economic losses and public humiliation when the senator’s grandson, also an Exeter and Harvard alumnus, was sent to prison in 1937 for a crime that dominated national headlines. After decades of ostentatious wealth, it was a loss that, in the end, put the family on the rolls of New York City’s welfare department.

I first became intrigued by the Bruce family during a presentation to an audience of Harvard students several years after I had graduated. I was there to speak about my book Our Kind of People, a social history of America’s black upper class. The audience, which consisted of college students and several adults from the community, had just finished asking me questions about my research, when one student approached me after the discussion. Holding a copy of the book, he pointed to a 1969 photo that showed Edward Brooke, the black senator from Massachusetts, standing next to a black Detroit debutante. After reading the picture’s caption, this student, an eighteen-year-old freshman, was incredulous and announced, I thought Carol Moseley-Braun was the first black senator!

To my surprise, no one in the group offered a correction. I perused the audience, stunned to discover that the collective memory—or understanding of our black history—was this shallow. No, I answered. Ed Brooke was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1966. And about a hundred years before that, I added, to drive my point home, there were two black senators—Hiram Revels, who was elected to a partial term; and Blanche Bruce, who was the first black elected to a full six-year term. In fact, Bruce’s son went to college here.

I walked away from the conversation, disturbed that a college student could be so unaware of a basic historical fact, but also very embarrassed that I, myself, didn’t have much more knowledge of the circumstances that made it possible for a black man to be elected to the U.S. Senate and to send his son to Harvard in the 1890s. So, this book started as a project to educate myself, as well as to record the story of a fascinating American family.

My research was aided by several institutions and many more individuals. They are: Howard University and its Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, which shared the many private letters written by Senator Bruce, Josephine Bruce, Clara Bruce, Roscoe Bruce Sr. and Jr.; the reference staff of Harvard University Archives in Nathan Pusey Library, which shared the school records, personal letters, and other data related to Roscoe Bruce Sr. and Jr.; Jane Knowles, archivist at Radcliffe College, who provided letters, school records, and other data on Clara Washington Burrill Bruce and Clara Washington Bruce; Fern Coleman of the Office of the Registrar of Harvard Law School, who provided school records on Burrill Bruce; the Schomburg Library; the New York Public Library; the Library of Congress; Boston University Law School archives, which supplied student information on Clara Burrill Bruce; Peter Knapp, archivist at Trinity College who provided information on Bruce family friend T. John Syphax, later known as T. John McKee; Leigh Bonney, a good friend who opened the doors of Phillips Exeter Academy for me; Ed Desrochers, archivist at Phillips Exeter, who provided records on Roscoe Bruce Sr. and Roscoe Bruce Jr. during their years at the school; Tuskegee University, which shared its records during the time that Roscoe Bruce worked for Booker T. Washington; Columbia University’s Keith Walton, Susan Hamson, and Jocelyn Wilk; Betty Koed, assistant curator in the U.S. Senate Historical Office, who opened many files on Senator Bruce, Senator Revels, and others who served in the U.S. Senate during the 1870s and 1880s; Melinda Smith of the U.S. Senate Curator’s Office, who provided information on the senator’s term as well as on the creation of the senator’s official portrait and its unveiling.

Special gratitude is owed to two institutions that three generations of the Bruce family held dear: Harvard University and Howard University. I am especially grateful to the following people at Harvard who made my four years of research at the school possible. They are President Lawrence Summers, Barbara Graham, Robert Cashion, and Barbara Meloni. At Howard University and its Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, I am grateful to Thomas Battle, Donna Wells, Clifford Muse, Jean Currie Church, and Joellen El Bashir.

I also thank Sandra Miranda and her staff at the White Plains Public Library; Mount Vernon Public Library; Mark Hasskarl and his staff at the Chappaqua Public Library; Scarsdale Public Library; Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, Mississippi; the staff of the Library of Congress, which shared files of clippings, personal letters, and notes written by Senator Bruce; Historical Society of Washington, DC; the staff of the Charles Sumner Museum of the Board of Education of Washington, DC, for their records on Roscoe Bruce when he served as superintendent of the Colored Schools; Mary Edwards of the Curator’s Office at the Department of the U.S. Treasury, who gave me facts concerning Senator Bruce’s time spent as register of the U.S. Treasury; Nan Card, curator at the Hayes Library and Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center; William Pickens; the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; and Sigma Pi Phi’s Khephra Burns and Peyton Williams.

I learned details about a whole new generation of Bruce family members from the following people, and I thank them: Marnie Pillsbury in David Rockefeller’s Office at the Rockefeller Family Office in Manhattan, who allowed me to collect data on the ten-year period when Roscoe and Clara Bruce worked for John D. Rockefeller Jr. in the 1920s and 1930s; Kenneth Rose, Michele Hiltzik, and the research staff at the Rockefeller Family Archive Center at Pocantico Hills, who shared dozens of letters written to Roscoe Bruce, bank documents and articles and photos that chronicled the years when the Bruce family was employed by the Rockefellers at the Dunbar Apartments and Dunbar National Bank. I thank Andrew Tisch and Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of New York University’s Tisch School of Arts, for giving me access to historical information on the Bruce family in New York and elsewhere. I am grateful to Bruce family descendant Dr. Norma Rozelle, who was kind enough to give me two very long interviews as she shared details from her family’s personal records. I also thank friends who assisted me in my research—Gregory Schwarz and Jamil French—who helped in between college, law school, and their new careers. I thank Stephen Gura, Jeannie Goldie, New York Amsterdam News archives, Keith Walton and Aubria Corbitt, Cathy Hemming, Susan Weinberg, and Jane Friedman at HarperCollins for believing in me.

There were many friends and colleagues who assisted me in ways that went beyond my library and archival research. Within that group, I must include Rev. James Forbes of Riverside Church, Tina Brown and Harold Evans, Vernon Jordan, Ann and Andrew Tisch, Bill Lewis, Jackie Leo, Brian Duffy, Pamela and Leonard Yablon, Lisa Linden, Judy Marcus, Lawrence and Teresa Hamdan, Jay Ward, Debbie Perry, Marcella Maxwell, Earl Graves, Hazel Dukes, Percy Sutton, Roscoe Brown, Paul and Ammie Williams, Helen and Milton Williams, Judith Riggs, Dorothy and Vicki Holloway, Janet Wells, Anita Jackson, Lynne Perry-Bottinger, Dauna Williams, Jordan Horvath, Larry and Laura Gordon, Charles Ogletree, and Derrick Bell.

I am honored to have an editor like Marjorie Braman, because she demanded the best from me—and gave the best of herself—over an extended period that included the deaths of both of my parents and other losses. This history is more complete because of her, and she helped turn that period of researching and writing into one of triumph. I thank my literary agent, Esther Newberg, for taking me through this process all these years. And I thank Tammy Richards, Kathy Schneider, and especially Peggy Hageman for keeping the papers flowing in the right direction. On my own home turf in New York and Chappaqua, I thank the people that make my life run smoothly. They are Carmen Villar, Laurie Lotz, and Carol Rodriguez, because they organize and inspire every day. And there is my family—Searcy O. Graham, Richard E. Graham, Delores Harris, Claudia Foston, Jean Walker, Mirian Calhoun Hinds, Sandy Eulinberg Fletcher, Magnolia Williams, and dear Margaret Morton and Barry Cozier—who have given me a lifetime of reasons for getting our people’s history right.

When this project began, my parents, Betty and Richard Graham, were a continual resource for me as they opened their personal address books and called their contacts in Harlem, Memphis, Tuskegee, and Washington, and connected me with people who gave me information on the Bruce family and the institutions the family was associated with during its three generations. I am grateful to them and all our friends in Jack & Jill, Horace Mann School, the Links, and Sigma Pi Phi Boulé for their networks that helped me.

I thank my children, Gordon, Harrison, and Lindsey, for giving me their patience and enthusiasm. And finally, I express my greatest gratitude to my brilliant wife, Pamela Thomas-Graham, whom I continue to admire as she balances her own corporate career and writing career while also giving me advice and inspiration. I thank her for giving me support every step of the way.

LAWRENCE OTIS GRAHAM

Chappaqua, New York

CAST OF CHARACTERS

BLANCHE KELSO BRUCE—Born a slave in 1841 in Prince Edward County, Virginia, he later moved to Mississippi and became a Republican politician. Married Josephine Beal Willson in Cleveland, Ohio. Father of Roscoe Conkling Bruce Sr. Elected to the U.S. Senate from Mississippi in 1874, later served as register of the U.S. Treasury under Presidents James Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, and William McKinley. Served as recorder of deeds for Washington, DC, under President Benjamin Harrison.

JOSEPHINE BEAL WILLSON BRUCE—The wife of Senator Blanche K. Bruce and mother of Roscoe Conkling Bruce Sr. Born in Philadelphia in 1853 to Dr. Joseph Willson and Elizabeth Harnett Willson. Married Blanche Bruce in 1878 in Cleveland, Ohio, and became a respected socialite hostess among Washington’s white liberals and the black elite. Originally an elementary school teacher, she was hired in 1899 by Booker T. Washington as lady principal (dean of women) at Tuskegee Institute, and in 1901 ran unsuccessfully for the national presidency of the National Association of Colored Women.

ROSCOE CONKLING BRUCE SR.—The only child of Blanche and Josephine Bruce. Born in Washington in 1879, he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University. Served as head of Education Department at Tuskegee Institute, then as superintendent of Washington, DC, Colored School System, then as manager of John D. Rockefeller’s Dunbar Apartments in New York City. Married childhood friend Clara Burrill.

CLARA WASHINGTON BURRILL BRUCE—The childhood friend and later wife of Roscoe Bruce Sr. Mother of Clara Jr., Roscoe Jr., and Burrill Bruce. Born in 1880, she attended Radcliffe College and Boston University Law School, where she became president of the law review, and the first black woman to pass the Massachusetts bar. Published essays and poetry in several publications, including the Saturday Evening Post. Served as assistant manager of Rockefeller’s Dunbar Apartments.

CLARA BRUCE JR.—Oldest child and only daughter of Roscoe Bruce Sr. and Clara Bruce Sr. Born in 1904, attended Washington, DC, Dunbar High School and Howard University, and Radcliffe College in Massachusetts. Against parents’ wishes, married Washington friend Barrington Guy. After having two sons, Clara and Barrington began passing as Indian and white in the 1940s.

ROSCOE CONKLING BRUCE JR.—Oldest son of Roscoe Conkling Bruce Sr. and Clara Washington Burrill Bruce. Born in 1906, attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University. The subject in 1923 of a nationwide public battle, in which he was initially denied a room in white freshman dorms at Harvard. Hired by Prudential Insurance to manage Richard B. Harrison Apartments in New Jersey and was sent to state prison in 1937, after staging a false robbery to conceal his mismanagement of rent monies.

BURRILL K. BRUCE—Youngest son of Roscoe Conkling Bruce Sr. and Clara Washington Burrill Bruce. Born in 1909, attended Cambridge Latin School, New York University, and Harvard Law School. Practiced law in New York City.

BARRINGTON GUY JR. (LATER KNOWN AS BARRINGTON SHARMA)—Washington, DC, childhood friend of Clara Bruce Jr. Eloped with Clara when she was entering Radcliffe and refused parents’ wishes to annul the marriage. During the 1920s and 1930s, he performed as a black actor and singer in New York plays and nightclubs, and in movies. In 1940, changed last name to Sharma in order to pass for white or Indian, and performed in nonblack clubs and venues.

POLLY BRUCE—Mother of Blanche Bruce. Worked as a house slave for white owner, Lemuel Bruce. She was later owned by Lemuel Bruce’s daughter Rebecca Bruce Perkinson and Rebecca’s husband, Pettis Perkinson. Died in Leavenworth, Kansas, in the 1880s.

HENRY CLAY BRUCE—One of Blanche K. Bruce’s older brothers. Became active in the Kansas State Republican Party, served as doorkeeper of the State Senate, and ran unsuccessfully for Kansas State Legislature in 1880. Later worked in Washington, DC, for U.S. Pension Department. Published his autobiography, The New Man: Twenty-nine Years a Slave, Twenty-nine Years a Free Man, in 1895.

JOSEPH WILLSON—The father of Josephine Willson and father-in-law of Blanche Bruce. Born in 1817, he was one of the few black dentists in Philadelphia during the mid-1800s. He was born in Georgia, raised in Philadelphia, and educated in Quaker schools. He authored a book on the black elite in 1841, Sketches of the Higher Classes Among the Colored Society in Philadelphia. According to the Richmond County, Georgia, archives, his father, John, was a founding director, in 1810, of the Bank of Augusta.

ELIZABETH HARNETT WILLSON—The mother of Josephine Willson and mother-in-law of Blanche Bruce. Like her husband, Joseph, she was born a free black person in Georgia.

LEONIDAS WILLSON—Brother to Josephine Willson and brother-in-law to Blanche Bruce. Born in Philadelphia in 1846, he was one of the most successful black attorneys in the city and later in Cleveland. After his first marriage, he ended his ties to the black community and with his black family during the late 1890s.

EMILY WILLSON HARANG—Oldest sister to Josephine Willson. Her husband became the manager of Josephine and Blanche Bruce’s Mississippi plantation after the senator’s death in 1898.

MARY WILLSON—The first of Josephine Willson’s two unmarried younger sisters who taught grammar school in Indianapolis.

VICTORIA WILLSON—The second of Josephine Willson’s two unmarried younger sisters who taught grammar school in Indianapolis.

LEMUEL BRUCE—Original white slave owner of Blanche Bruce’s mother, Polly. Father of Rebecca Bruce Perkinson.

REBECCA BRUCE PERKINSON—Daughter of Lemuel Bruce. Married to Pettis Perkinson and owner of Blanche Bruce.

WILLIE PERKINSON—White son of Blanche Bruce’s slave owners, Pettis Perkinson and Rebecca Bruce Perkinson, in Virginia. Childhood playmate of Blanche; later joined the Confederate Army.

GEORGE CORNELIUS SMITH—Close black friend and confidant to Blanche Bruce in Ohio, Mississippi, and Washington. Often served as personal secretary and adviser on Senator Bruce’s correspondence and speeches. Wrote articles about Blanche.

ADELBERT AMES—Liberal white Republican supporter of Blanche Bruce, who served as provisional governor of Mississippi in 1868–1870, then was U.S. senator representing Mississippi in 1870–1874, and later served as governor of Mississippi in 1874–1876. Born in Maine, he was a graduate of West Point and served as a corporal and brigadier general for the Union Army.

JAMES ALCORN—White Republican supporter of Blanche Bruce up until the time Bruce was elected to the Senate. Alcorn wavered between moderate and liberal positions, and served as governor of Mississippi in 1870–1871, then as U.S. senator representing Mississippi in 1871–1877. Refused to present Bruce to the Senate body on the day of Bruce’s swearing in at the Capitol.

ROSCOE CONKLING—Liberal white Republican U.S. senator representing New York (1867–1881), and mentor of Blanche Bruce when the latter joined the Senate. Was the namesake for Blanche’s only child, Roscoe Conkling Bruce. A powerful political boss, Conkling got Bruce named to various Senate committees. He later fell out of favor with President James Garfield.

JOHN ROY LYNCH—Black friend and political adviser to Blanche Bruce. Served as speaker of the House in Mississippi legislature. Elected to U.S. House of Representatives in 1872, and then again in 1882. By the 1890s, became one of the wealthiest blacks in Washington. Worked with James Hill to maintain control over Mississippi Republican Party.

JAMES HILL—Black friend and Mississippi political adviser to Blanche and John Roy Lynch. Served as Mississippi secretary of state and worked with John Roy Lynch and Blanche Bruce to maintain control over Mississippi Republican Party during 1870s and 1880s. Later resented Bruce’s national success and felt unappreciated after keeping Bruce’s power base in place.

PINCKNEY BENTON STEWART (P. B. S.) PINCHBACK—Wealthy black Republican Louisiana politician and friend of Blanche Bruce. In 1868, elected to the State Senate, then served as lieutenant governor and governor of Louisiana, and published the black weekly newspaper, The New Orleans Louisianian. Was elected to the U.S. Senate, but was never allowed to be seated. Later moved to Washington, DC.

GEORGE HOAR—White liberal Republican friend and Senate colleague to Blanche Bruce. Powerful U.S. senator from Massachusetts—serving 1877–1904—who hailed from aristocratic New England family of politicians. Descendant of Harvard president Leonard Hoar and brother of U.S. Attorney General Ebenezer Hoar. Graduated from Harvard and sat on the school’s board of overseers. Helped Blanche Bruce’s son gain entrance to Phillips Exeter and Harvard.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS—Born a slave in 1817 in Maryland, he became one of the most prominent abolitionists in the nation. Supporter, adviser, and friend to Blanche and Josephine Bruce. Served as minister to Haiti, recorder of deeds, and president of Freedman’s Savings and Trust Co. Asked Blanche and Josephine Bruce to serve as his witnesses at his controversial second marriage—to Helen Pitts, a white feminist newspaper editor and teacher—in 1884.

ARCHIBALD HENRY GRIMKÉ—Black friend of Blanche and Josephine Bruce. An 1874 Harvard Law School graduate, Grimké was appointed by Bruce to represent Massachusetts in the Colored Exhibits at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans in 1885, but Grimké later publicly denounced the worldwide gathering because its exhibits were racially segregated. Grimké’s brother, Francis, was the prominent Washington minister at Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church.

T. JOHN MINTON SYPHAX (LATER KNOWN AS T. JOHN MCKEE)—Black childhood friend of Roscoe Sr. Attended Phillips Exeter with Roscoe, then Trinity College and Columbia University School of Law, where he changed his name and began passing as white. Became Wall Street lawyer and married a white woman in New York City. Later, in the 1940s, publicly acknowledged his true black identity in order to claim the remainder of his black grandfather’s two-million dollar estate. Descendant of black elite Syphax family who donated their land to enlarge Arlington National Cemetery.

LUCIUS Q. C. LAMAR—White Democratic Mississippi politician who served as leading spokesman against Reconstruction and against black equality. Served in U.S. House of Representatives before and after Civil War, and as U.S. senator in 1877–1885. As junior senator from Mississippi, had cordial relations with senior senator Blanche Bruce. Although a segregationist, he reportedly recommended Bruce for cabinet post and later served on the Supreme Court.

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON—Founder of Tuskegee Institute and influential educator who advised blacks to embrace trade schools and industrial labor rather than liberal arts colleges and professional careers. With the political and economic support of white industrialists, such as Andrew Carnegie and J. Pierpoint Morgan, became the most powerful black man in America. Hired Josephine Bruce as lady principal in 1899; paid Roscoe Jr. to spy on Booker’s opponents in Boston while Roscoe was a Harvard student. Later hired Roscoe to head Tuskegee Institute’s Education Department in 1903. Disliked by many among the black elite.

ROBERT TERRELL—Black Washington lawyer and friend to Blanche and Josephine Bruce. Class of 1884 graduate of Harvard College, lawyer and municipal judge in Washington. Married to Mary Church of Memphis, daughter of Robert Church, the wealthiest black man in the American South. With his politically active wife, Mary—who later sat on the Washington, DC, Board of Education—he served as mentor to Roscoe C. Bruce Sr.

ULYSSES S. GRANT—Eighteenth president of the United States. Served in 1869–1877. Liberal Republican who supported Reconstruction policies and befriended Blanche Bruce. Hosted Senator and Mrs. Bruce in Europe during their 1878 honeymoon.

RUTHERFORD B. HAYES—Nineteenth president of the United States. Served in 1877–1881. Although he served as a Republican, his election was a key element of the Compromise of 1877, which led to the end of Reconstruction and advanced the racial goals of white Democrats and Southerners.

JAMES GARFIELD—Twentieth president of the United States. Served in 1881. Ohio Republican who appointed Blanche K. Bruce as register of the U.S. Treasury. Became a foe of Bruce mentor Roscoe Conkling.

CHESTER A. ARTHUR—Twenty-first president of the United States. Served in 1881–1885, after Garfield’s assassination. Kept Bruce as register of the U.S. Treasury.

BENJAMIN HARRISON—Twenty-third president of the United States. Served in 1889–1893. Indiana Republican who opposed putting blacks in important government roles, but was pressured into appointing Blanche Bruce recorder of deeds for Washington, DC.

WILLIAM MCKINLEY—Twenty-fifth president of the United States. Served in 1897–1901. Ohio Republican who appointed Blanche K. Bruce as register of the U.S. Treasury.

WILLIAM WINDOM—Republican politician from Minnesota. Served as U.S. senator during Bruce’s time in the Senate. Appointed secretary of the Treasury by President Garfield; Bruce’s boss when the latter became register of the Treasury in 1881.

CALVIN CHASE—Attorney and publisher of the black Washington newspaper The Washington Bee, which he ran from 1882 to 1921. Was a friend to Blanche Bruce, serving as a pallbearer at the senator’s funeral. Was a major critic of Roscoe C. Bruce Sr., and led an aggressive and successful campaign to have Roscoe fired as superintendent of the city’s Colored Schools. Was critical of elite blacks who made compromises with whites.

A. LAWRENCE LOWELL—President of Harvard University from 1909 until 1933. Born into a prominent New England family, he graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and established the school’s house system. Created discriminatory housing policy that barred blacks from the freshman dormitories in Harvard Yard. Lost a public fight to keep Roscoe Bruce Jr. out of the all-white dormitories.

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER JR.—Philanthropist, powerful New York businessman, and investor in real estate. Son of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller. Built the Dunbar Apartments complex in Harlem in 1926, which was the first housing development for the black middle class in New York City. Hired Roscoe C. Bruce and Clara B. Bruce to manage the Dunbar from 1927 to 1936.

CHARLES O. HEYDT—Chief real estate adviser to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and senior executive at Rockefeller’s office, which ran the Dunbar Apartments in Harlem. Beginning in 1927, served as liaison between John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Roscoe C. Bruce Sr.

HARRIET SHADD BUTCHER—Washington family friend of Roscoe and Clara Bruce’s, who moved to New York City in 1920s. Served as a teacher in Washington’s Colored Schools, then later became superintendent at Russell Sage Foundation in New York City. Helped Roscoe get a job at Rockefeller-owned Dunbar Apartments. Had many New York City dates (possibly an affair) with Roscoe while his wife, Clara, was living in Cambridge and attending law school. Won a public 1929 lawsuit, humiliating Roscoe, after accusing him of not repaying her several thousand dollars.

CHAPTER ONE

1875

A Senator Is Sworn In and a Dynasty Begins

ON THE FRIDAY MORNING OF MARCH 5, 1875, THE FIRST BLACK MAN elected to a full term as senator of the United States, Blanche Kelso Bruce of Mississippi, sat in seat number two of the Senate Chamber, awaiting his swearing in. Behind him, in the mammoth room, stretched the crescent-shaped arrangement of wide wooden seats. There were three rows of chairs with a desk for every seat—seventy-four in all—one for each of the two senators from the thirty-seven states that, in 1875, made up the Union. Tall Corinthian pilasters framed the room.

Thanks to windows high above in the thirty-five-foot iron-and-glass ceiling, the otherwise windowless room was not as dim as the new senator from Mississippi might have expected. As Bruce sat there on his first day, dressed in a black waistcoat, bow tie, and a stiff cotton shirt, with his handlebar mustache and a fourteen-karat gold pocket watch, he might have convinced himself that he was the very picture of a Reconstruction survivor who had succeeded and who proved that leaders could be elected and accepted, regardless of their color. He might have convinced himself that he was living proof that race and class no longer mattered in the United States, that it was possible for a black former slave from Virginia to overcome poverty, bigotry, and political differences in order to enjoy the same success that white men of achievement were enjoying. But it would have been almost impossible to really believe those things.

By the time Blanche Bruce arrived in Washington, DC, for his swearing-in ceremony, Reconstruction policies had been in place for nearly ten years, making it possible for blacks in Southern states not only to vote but also to run for office and receive municipal, state, and federal appointments.

But now that Bruce finally had been elected, the tide was already starting to turn against blacks—particularly in his home state of Mississippi. Although the Northern states were in step with the liberal Republicans who controlled Congress, Mississippi residents were unwilling to allow this national liberal mood to continue sweeping through their state, even if it meant they had to rely on coercion and illegal activity. There, the white Democrats and hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were inciting racial violence and organizing aggressive ballot-stuffing in order to discourage black citizens and black candidates from voting or running for office. At the very moment Bruce sat in the Senate, his white constituents back home were contemplating methods for driving black legislators out of office, and his primary mentor, Governor Adelbert Ames, was losing control of Mississippi to renegade groups. Even the newspapers in his home state were supporting the suppression of black freedmen as a means to stomp out Reconstruction and return to the old order.

It was clear to Bruce and many other black political figures that Reconstruction’s underpinnings were never fully accepted by white Southerners. It had been undermined at each step since it was first introduced by President Lincoln in 1865. When the liberal Republican anti-slavery president was shot just five days after the Confederate Army surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant, black Americans inherited a new pro-slavery president. Besides being a virulent racist and former Tennessee Democrat, Andrew Johnson did not believe in black equality and sought to veto all congressional acts that attempted to give the recently freed blacks an education, job training, or even citizenship. He also opposed any military protection for blacks against violence from newly established hate groups such as the Klan. As a native Southerner himself, Johnson was so sympathetic to the vanquished Confederate states he permitted them to establish discriminatory Black Codes that severely limited the movement, activities, and rights of recently freed blacks. Bruce’s home state of Mississippi had been the first to create these codes. It was not until the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which provided for military rule in Southern states, that black citizens finally benefited from the new legal rights and opportunities that were promised to them at the end of the Civil War. It was then that blacks could finally play a role in drafting new state constitutions and run for positions in political party conventions. Almost immediately, in 1868, the first black was elected to the House of Representatives.¹

By 1875, many of the Democratic newspapers in Mississippi and other parts of the South argued that white citizens should begin voting along color lines and using the aggressive instincts of the white people to defeat the blacks and the Republicans.² During the same month that Bruce was sworn in to the U.S. Senate, one of his own state’s newspapers, The Hinds County Gazette, would run a pro-Democrat editorial that said, [Governor] Ames and his negroes [have] swept away every vestige of republican government in Mississippi and that the people have been robbed of their birthright.³ This message of racial hatred was beginning to turn the tide against the freed blacks, even as Blanche Bruce won the right to represent his state in the Senate.

Bruce must have been nervous as he looked around the poorly ventilated Senate chamber, waiting to be sworn in. Staring down at him was the broad second-floor gallery that wrapped around all four sides of the chamber. Only a few rays of light broke through the twenty-one glass ceiling panels. Crowded toward the front, the seventy-four desks and their occupants all faced the lectern and the vice president’s desk, where Bruce and twenty-two other men would be sworn in that day.

At noon, Vice President Henry Wilson called the room to order. O Thou Almighty and everlasting God, the maker of heaven and earth, began Reverend Byron Sunderland, the Senate chaplain, as he offered the opening prayer. Give them to see eye to eye, in all the grave matters of this nation committed to their charge, and in all their labors and responsibilities may they lean upon Thy arm for support. Through Jesus Christ. Amen.⁴

Next, the chief clerk read a proclamation from President Ulysses S. Grant declaring that the special session of the Senate was permitted to convene that day. Surrounding the senators’ seats were 1,700 yards of floral-patterned purple carpeting and ornate walls with heavy plaster crown molding. Wilson, himself a former senator from Massachusetts, had already asked more than a dozen newly elected senators to proceed to the front of the grand room, each escorted by the senior senator from the same state. For this group of senators-elect, the tradition of using escorts was, indeed, necessary, since nineteen of the twenty-three senators to be sworn in that day were completely new to the governmental body.

Then it was Bruce’s turn.

Senator-elect Blanche Kelso Bruce of Mississippi, called Vice President Wilson’s voice into the large ornate chamber.

Bruce unclasped his hands and stood slowly as he looked at the men around him.

Senator-elect Blanche Kelso Bruce, the loud voice at the front repeated. Of Mississippi!

Three long rows of men, many of them white-haired, turned to Bruce and waited with curious expressions. They watched and waited for Bruce’s escort to come to the black man’s side.

But no escort came. The senior senator from Mississippi, James Lusk Alcorn, did not move. He remained in seat number fourteen, his face hidden behind a newspaper.

The lone black man in the room, Bruce finally moved to the end of his row and then glanced back at Alcorn, who remained in his seat. Seeing that Alcorn was not going to follow proper protocol and lead the senator-elect to the front, Bruce looked to the front, adjusted his coat, and strolled slowly down the purple carpeted aisle by himself.

As Bruce advanced a few steps, he was suddenly joined by a thin, full-bearded man with a receding hairline.

If I may, Mr. Bruce, the courtly white gentleman said with a slight nod as he took Bruce’s arm. Permit me. I am the senator from New York, Roscoe Conkling.

The room of white men watched in stunned silence as the two reached the front. Bruce would later share his experience with the National Republican:

When I came up to the Senate, I knew no one except Senator Alcorn, who was my colleague. When the names of the new Senators were called out for them to go up and take the oath, all the others except myself were escorted by their colleagues. Mr. Alcorn made no motion to escort me, but was buried behind a newspaper, and I concluded I would go it alone…[Conkling] linked his arm in mine and we marched up to the desk together. I took the oath and then he escorted me back to my seat. Later in the day when they were fixing up the committees, Conkling asked me if any one was looking out after my interests, and upon my informing him that there was not and that I was myself more ignorant of my rights in the matter, he volunteered to attend to it, and as a result, I was placed on some very good committees.⁵

He and Conkling would eventually enjoy a long friendship in the Senate (Bruce would ultimately name his own son after the white Republican senator from New York), and Bruce would never again feel so vulnerable in the Senate Chamber as he felt that day.

For even though he was reaching the greatest heights of power and dignity possible for a black man in America, he simultaneously could see how easily all of it could be taken away—both in that chamber and back home in Mississippi.

At that moment, Bruce was certain that he had reached the pinnacle of his career. He was a thirty-four-year-old black man who had begun life as a fatherless Virginia slave and risen to become a powerful U.S. senator. Between the time he had escaped bondage in 1863 and now—just twelve years—he had left his siblings and mother in Missouri, studied at Oberlin College in Ohio, taught school in Kansas, and taken up residence in Mississippi, where Reconstruction policies made it possible for him to join and quickly rise through the ranks of the Republican Party. By cultivating the right white mentors, like Mississippi governor Adelbert Ames, and the powerful white scalawags, like Senator James Alcorn, he got himself appointed or elected to such positions as county sheriff, tax collector, school superintendent, and county commissioner in northwestern Mississippi’s Bolivar County. None of his white benefactors, including Alcorn, had expected him to move beyond the status of local government official. And it was because people always underestimated Bruce’s ambition and his talents that his white colleagues never felt threatened by his accomplishments.

Always clever and forever expressing gratitude to those who had helped him in the past, he learned how to perform favors for those who could help him in the future. He also learned how to both buy and foreclose on properties for which he had been assigned to collect overdue taxes. By doing so, Bruce managed to amass enough rental property in his own Mississippi town to supplement the salaries from his overlapping municipal jobs. With these earnings, he was eventually able to purchase an eight-hundred-acre plantation that produced enough cotton, corn, and livestock to finance his political and social ambitions.

Throughout this time, he identified other bright and ambitious black men who expressed an interest in politics and business. Together with them, he assembled a black political machine that reached out to the large number of black freedmen who were eager to exercise the voting rights that they had been denied as slaves. Soon, Bruce and his black political colleagues were noticed by white Republican carpetbaggers and scalawags who saw how the Republican Party could benefit from an association with Bruce and the black voters who believed in him. These were the same whites who recognized how the nation’s 450,000 black Republican votes made it possible for President Grant to defeat his Democratic opponent by 300,000 votes.

It would not be long before the white Mississippi Republicans saw that they could exert true dominance over the Southern Democrats once they embraced the blacks and made them a part of their Republican Party structure. And this consolidation of forces—one white and one black—was the factor that precipitated Blanche Kelso Bruce’s rise to power and ultimately got him elected to the U.S. Senate in 1874 and brought him to the Senate chamber on this day in March of 1875.

At that moment, Bruce probably felt he had done all that a black man could possibly dream of. Only four days earlier, Congress had passed a Civil Rights Act that ended discrimination in all public accommodations. He had become a national figure at an important time in America’s history. His very presence there allowed him to occupy a page in the history books. But there would be many more goals for this man to reach, and many barriers for him to break as he advanced in the world of politics and business.

Here was a man who would not only be the first black to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate but also serve as a power broker among white and black political figures in both parties for the next twenty years. Even as Reconstruction was to be unraveled on a national level, and segregation began to undermine the gains that blacks had gotten in government and elsewhere in society during this period, Bruce would be nominated for vice president, gain the friendship of President Grant, serve as head of the Mississippi State Republicans, and ultimately receive top appointments in the Treasury Department and elsewhere from Presidents Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and McKinley. And, surprising to even him, two of these presidents would make it possible for him to be the first black man to have his signature printed on U.S. currency.

Perhaps even more interesting, Bruce would establish the first black American dynasty—one that mirrored the white dynasties formed by his contemporaries, such as the Hoars of Massachusetts, the Roosevelts of New York, the Frelinghuysens of New Jersey, and the Harrisons of Ohio. He ruled over a black Washington society that included such friends as abolitionist Frederick Douglass, hotel owner James Wormley, attorney and minister to Haiti John Mercer Langston, educator Booker T. Washington, and Memphis-born millionairess Mary Church Terrell and her Harvard-educated husband, Judge Robert Terrell, who would later help Bruce’s son gain admission to Harvard College. Two years into his six-year Senate term, Bruce would solidify his position by marrying into an upper-class black family that brought him prestige and access to a larger freeborn black elite community that had previously been closed to him as a former slave. At the time, his net worth was estimated at just over $150,000—more than $2.5 million in today’s dollars—an astounding sum at the time, for a black or a white.

Marrying the educated and light-complexioned Philadelphia-born Josephine Willson enabled Bruce to parlay his money, his vast real estate holdings, and his career credentials into a package that made him attractive to the liberal white Washington community as well. Josephine was sufficiently elegant and respected that their 1878 wedding became the first black nuptials to be reported in the society columns of the New York Times and the Washington Post.⁶ As the daughter of a freeborn black dentist and the granddaughter of the founder of the Bank of Augusta, Josephine had all the credentials and exposure to prepare her for the life of Washington’s first black socialite and hostess to the world’s black elite. Many of the nation’s newspapers wrote stories about her afternoon teas, and made predictions about which Senate wives and Supreme Court wives would be willing to cross the color line and return the black hostess’s invitations. The expensive wedding clothes purchased at New York and Washington department stores by the bride and groom, as well as their subsequent honeymoon to Europe, where they toured London and Paris and visited with former president Grant, all became a part of the background for Bruce’s historic ascent.

With the subsequent birth and naming of his son in 1879 after his white Senate mentor, Roscoe Conkling, Senator Bruce launched the second generation of the Bruce dynasty. Following the example of his New Orleans friend Pinckney B. S. Pinchback—Louisiana’s first black governor and lieutenant governor—Bruce and his wife moved into a palatial red-brick Washington town house at 909 M Street NW and hosted numerous high-profile social events. Wanting his son to enjoy the same opportunities as the children of other prominent political figures, he relied on the advice of his white political friends and, in 1896, took his fifteen-year-old boy out of Washington’s all-black M Street High School. He sent him to boarding school in New Hampshire, at Phillips Exeter Academy, where young Roscoe was one of six black students. Roscoe would eventually enter Harvard University in 1898—just months after Blanche was named register of the U.S. Treasury by President McKinley—and then ultimately graduate Phi Beta Kappa. Like his father, Roscoe would be paired with a daughter of the black elite—this time, a woman who had gone to both Radcliffe and Boston University Law School. Later, through the family’s ties to such power brokers as Booker T. Washington and John D. Rockefeller Jr., Roscoe’s children would be the second generation of Bruces to attend Exeter and Harvard, and they would also go on to make history in such places as Boston, Washington, and New York City.

As the senator stood there with his hand on the vice president’s Bible that Friday afternoon of March 5, 1875, in the United States Senate Chamber, he had no idea how wide-ranging his legacy would be for a whole race of people. He had no idea how many complicated twists and turns his life was still to take in the coming years, and how those experiences would impact the fortunes and misfortunes of the future generations of his own—and America’s first—black dynasty.

CHAPTER TWO

1841–1861

Blanche Bruce’s Slave Family in Virginia and Missouri

THE STORY OF BLANCHE KELSO BRUCE BEGINS IN VIRGINIA, ON A RUSTIC Prince Edward County plantation where he was born into slavery on March 1, 1841.¹ Sixty miles west of Richmond and just east of the Blue Ridge mountain range, this rural Virginia setting served as a midpoint for horse-drawn coaches brimming with the corn, wheat, and tobacco that had been harvested by slaves and sent east to city merchants in Richmond by country farmers. This bucolic area would gain a nineteenth-century prominence for being just a few miles from Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and a twentieth-century footnote for being the infamous county that fought school desegregation so hard that its schools became one of the five defendant school districts represented by the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case.²

But in the early 1840s, just ninety years after its founding in 1754, Prince Edward County had little political or economic influence on the rest of Virginia. It was fertile farmland to be worked, and it was a sixty-square-mile area to be passed through on the way to larger metropolitan areas in the east, such as Richmond, Norfolk, and Chesapeake.

The county, with its sleepy towns of Worsham and Farmville, was composed of simple farming communities populated with large plantations owned not by the sophisticated white gentry—the planters—found closer to larger cities along the Mississippi or Atlantic coast but by slave masters who supplemented their incomes by hiring out their slaves to work on the plantations or farms owned by others. This was the case for Blanche Bruce’s family, who spent the 1830s and early 1840s as slaves on various lands that sat along the road leading east to Richmond.³ That well-worn dirt road brought commerce back and forth between the eastern and western halves of the state.

Each day, from morning until late afternoon, the most trusted black slaves were charged with manning coaches with the highly valued harvests of their owners and bringing profits back from the city dealers who conducted business with them. Each day, the coaches would pass along the road that cut through and in front of the Lemuel Bruce plantation, where Blanche’s slave family worked.

The son of wealthy planters from Scotland, Lemuel Bruce owned the tobacco plantation with his wife and lived there with his slaves and his two children—a son, William, and a daughter, Rebecca. Among these slaves were Blanche’s mother, Polly, who was born in Virginia in 1800. Raised to be a house slave, Polly was responsible for inside labor: cooking, cleaning, and taking care of her owner’s wife and two children. Born to an African slave woman who had been raped by a slave trader, Polly lived in a slave cabin on Lemuel’s property but worked exclusively in the master’s main house.⁴

Polly’s work as a house slave—or house nigger, as she was called—was considered to be less punishing than the grueling outdoor labor of picking tobacco or cotton. In this role